Prince Lestat (58 page)

A vampire, a male who was part of Notker’s group, rose now and fetched a chair from against the wall and brought it to the table.

But this stately and impressive creature walked around to one side and made his way to Jesse, standing behind her, over her, and bending to speak to her intimately.

“It was never my wish to harm Maharet,” he said. “And I wish with all my heart and soul I’d found some way to avoid it. I did it because
she meant to exterminate us all. I swear to you this is true. And I killed Khayman because I thought when he came to grasp what I’d done, he’d seek to punish me for it.”

She stared straight forward, her eyes dull and red, and gazing off as if she hadn’t heard. She didn’t move. David did not look up at Rhoshamandes either.

Rhoshamandes sighed. And when he did that a rather casual and cavalier expression passed over his handsome features, a rather dismissive expression. It was only there for a second, but I caught it and was startled by it, startled by the hardness of it in contrast to these elegant and sensitive words.

He turned and went back to the foot of the table, so to speak, and sat down in the chair that had been provided for him.

“You know what I want,” he said. He addressed me. “You know what Amel wants. You know you, Lestat, you know that your son is with Benedict.” He reached into his pocket and held up a shining iPhone for all to see and then placed it before him on the table. “I press the button here and Benedict kills Viktor.” He paused, his eyes sweeping the table up and down and then settling on me. “But that does not have to happen, does it? And of course I have Mekare in a safe place, as you no doubt have surmised.”

I said nothing. With the power of his mind, he might send a blast from that phone, I figured. But did he know that? I certainly didn’t know it for certain. I hated him. I loathed the very sight of him.

“Need I remind you that if anything happens to me,” he went on, “the Voice will incite Benedict to immediately kill your son, and you may never find out the location of Mekare.”

The others stared at him in cold silence.

I
TRIED TO PENETRATE
the creature’s mind, trying to pick up the faintest image from it that might indicate precisely where Viktor was, and where Mekare was. And I knew surely that every other blood drinker at the table was doing this. Nothing. And whether the Voice was inside this being right now, looking through his eyes at me and at all of us, I couldn’t know.

“I can explain to you simply enough,” said Rhoshamandes, “what I want. The Voice wishes to come into me. I am loath to attempt this on my own. I feel I need the assistance of others here, most particularly Fareed, this vampire doctor. I need his help.”

Fareed said nothing.

“If we agree to proceed, I’ll take Fareed with me now, and when the deed is done, when Mekare is mercifully freed from this Earth, and the Voice is in me, I will return Fareed and Viktor unharmed. I will then possess the Sacred Core. And I will become the leader, so to speak, of this tribe.” He smiled coldly as he looked at Benji. “I assure you, I’m neither despotic nor obsessively interested in the conduct of blood drinkers. Like many a being who rises to power, I rise not because I want power, but because I don’t intend to be governed by anyone else.”

He was about to go on when Seth gestured for his attention. “Have you no hesitation,” he said, “about living with this Voice inside you night after night for the rest of your immortal journey in this world?”

Rhoshamandes didn’t immediately answer. Indeed his face went blank and became a bit rigid, a bit grim. He stared at the shiny little mobile phone in front of him and then he looked again at me and then at Seth.

“I am committed now to doing what the Voice wants,” he said. “The Voice wants to be freed from Mekare. The Voice can only temporarily possess any one of us at any given time, and the Voice does not see clearly or hear clearly through us when it possesses us. And in Mekare it is trapped in an instrument so damaged and blunted, so destroyed through isolation and privation, that it cannot hear or see at all.”

“Yes,” said Fareed quietly. “We all know this. We’re well aware of what the Voice is experiencing now. But Seth’s question was for you. How are you going to survive with the Voice inside you, night after—?”

“Yes, well, I will!” came the answer, emphatically and impatiently. Rhoshamandes flushed. “Do you think I have a choice?” he said. Then he drew back gesturing for silence. The Voice was talking to him, no doubt.

I was trying to conceal my thoughts completely, which meant leaving them in an inchoate state as best as I could, but clearly this creature was miserable, I could see it, miserable and conflicted, and his pale eyes, fixing on me again, couldn’t express anything but a deep frustration that bordered on pain.

“This must be followed to the finish,” he said now. “Fareed, I must ask you to come with me.”

“And what happens,” asked Sevraine suddenly, “when the Voice tires of being in your body, Rhoshamandes, and decides it wants to be transferred to another?”

“Well, very likely that is never going to happen!” Rhoshamandes flashed furiously, “because the Voice has things to learn in my body, a world to see as he’s never seen it before. This thing, this, this Voice …” He was stammering now in frustration. “This Voice has only just come to consciousness.”

“Yes, and it wants a better host body,” said Seth in a strong cold tone. “And it’s chosen you, a splendid male specimen, but once you take it into yourself you do realize it might just drive you stark raving mad.”

“We’re wasting time,” said Rhoshamandes. “Don’t you understand?”

“What? That you’re a pawn or a slave of this thing?” Seth was facing him and I couldn’t see his face except in semiprofile, but his tone was withering as before.

Rhoshamandes sat back in the chair and put up his hands. He stared at the phone again.

Suddenly Benji slid out of his place at my right and silently hurried down the length of the table until he stood at Rhoshamandes’s left and then he stared down at the phone.

“You touch it, and the boy dies!” said Rhoshamandes. He was now full of rage. His eyes were blazing as he glared at Benji, and his mouth was contorted, his lips pressed together and then released in a vicious sneer. “As I said, one errant signal from that phone and Benedict kills Viktor—.”

“And when that happens,” said Sevraine, “we destroy you, don’t we, in the most painful way because you no longer have any bargaining power whatsoever. What makes you think you can get what you want here?”

“I warn you!” He put up his right hand. Right, I was noticing. He’d taken out the phone with his right hand. Right-handed. “This will happen as the Voice has decreed.”

Marius cleared his throat and sat forward, hands clasped on the table. “The Voice is young to govern this tribe. And I think if you have the Sacred Core within you, you will expose yourself to the sun—and more of the younger generations of us will perish, because that’s what the Voice wants.”

“What of it!” demanded Rhoshamandes.

“What of it?” asked Marius. “All of us here have younger fledglings whom we love! You think I want to sit idly by while you destroy Armand, or Bianca?” He was allowing his own rage to rise. “You think I want to see Benji and Sybelle die?”

“Doesn’t matter what you want,” said Rhosh. “Do you realize that if you don’t respond to this offer within the next few minutes, if I fail to contact Benedict, he’ll kill the boy as directed, and I’ll withdraw from you—and make no mistake, I will do that so swiftly you’ll never catch me, and we will simply have to go over all this again, and again, and again, until the Voice achieves his purpose?”

“That sounds rather cynical to me,” said Marius.

“And to me also,” said Gregory. This was the first time he’d spoken.

“Don’t you realize what you’re dealing with!” Rhoshamandes glared at Gregory. “Nebamun,” he said, appealing to him by his ancient
name. “The Voice hears every word we’re saying here. The Voice is here with us. The Voice can direct Benedict to kill the boy—.”

“Ah, but will Benedict do this for the Voice,” asked Gregory, “without a word from you?”

“I think not,” said Allesandra. “I think your gentle Benedict is a poor choice of ally in this.”

“Don’t be such a fool!” said Rhoshamandes. He was desperate. “You don’t know where Mekare is.”

“Small matter, that,” said Marius, “since she’s safe wherever she is for the moment since you cannot take the Sacred Core from her without help.”

“Oh, yes, I can and I will.” He stood up. “I can leave here and kill that mortal boy and work the transfer just as it was worked before. Why, I might very well compel Viktor to assist me.”

I started to laugh. I couldn’t stop myself. I laughed. I just broke down laughing and then bending forward, my left hand on my waist as I laughed, I shot the Mind Gift at the iPhone and brought it right to me at my end of the table.

“Don’t you dare touch it!” Rhoshamandes roared. I knew the volume of his voice was hurting Rose, had to be hurting her, and could be heard out there on the street by any of the young who might be lingering about.

I laughed harder. I just couldn’t stop it. I really didn’t want to be laughing like this, but I couldn’t stop.

I snatched up the phone and shoved it in my pocket, and using the seat of the chair beside me as a step, I mounted the table, and laughing uncontrollably I started to walk down the length of it towards him.

“Oh, Voice,” I said through fits of laughter. “You are such a precocious child! However did you think this stupid plan would work!”

The Voice came into my head in a fury. “I’ll destroy your son!” he cried. “You will not block me in this.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, laughing, taking one stride after another on the gilded blocks of the table. “I know. I have heard your threats before, haven’t I? Don’t you realize that I am the only one here who actually loves you?”

I had reached the end and suddenly sat down on the edge of the table to one side of Rhoshamandes, who was glaring at me now in fury.

I snatched my ax from inside my coat with my right hand, as with my left I grabbed Rhoshamandes’s left forearm, and I brought the ax
down with a loud crash on his left wrist. In a tenth of a second it was done. The crescent blade flashed beautifully in the light.

The severed hand flew across the table. Rhoshamandes screamed in terror. Others around the table were gasping audibly, and shifting in their chairs.

Rhoshamandes stared at the hand, the blood pouring from his wrist, and tried to jerk himself free from me.

But just as I’d hoped, he couldn’t do this. He couldn’t move.

Marius and Seth and Sevraine and Gregory had all risen and were staring at him, pinning him there obviously with the Mind Gift as I knew they would.

The blood continued spurting out of his left arm, gushing on the table.

He tried to stifle another scream but he couldn’t.

“Is there any place,” I asked, “where we might burn that hand? I mean I can incinerate it here easily enough but I don’t want to scorch the table.”

“No!” he bellowed. He went mad trying to free himself from me, squirming, struggling against my hand and the invisible force that held him. I could see the preternatural flesh healing the breach at his wrist.

“You call that stupid little sorcerer’s apprentice of yours now,” I said, “and you tell him to free my son, or I’ll hack you up piece by piece. And I’ll burn each piece in front of you.” I leaned down and looked into his eyes. “Don’t think about trying to loose that fatal fire on me,” I said. “Or they’ll burn you black and dead at once.”

He was frozen in rage and panic. Unfortunate for him.

I yanked his arm out and swung the ax again right below his shoulder, slicing the arm free.

The screams that erupted from him shook the chandeliers. He stared down at the stump.

I flung the arm down the length of the table to the middle. At once several of the others pushed away from it, with the scrape of their chairs on the boards, and shrank back.

He stared at his arm, unable to stop the screams ripping from him until he clamped his right hand over his mouth. A long ghastly moan came from him.

More of the others had risen and were backing away from the table, a reaction that didn’t surprise me.

Seeing someone dismembered is difficult even for vampires of
supreme detachment and self-control—even when they know that the limbs can be reattached and thrive again. And of course, speaking of burning the limbs, well … that would take care of any future reattachment, wouldn’t it?

“We need a brazier with coals,” I said. “Or should we simply incinerate these fragments with the Fire Gift?” I glanced at the others, then back at Rhoshamandes “I’d tell the Voice to go to Hell, if I were you, and I’d call Benedict now and tell him to release my son.”

I drew the phone out of my pocket.

“Benji, put the little thing on speaker, will you?” I slapped it down on the table.

Benji did as I had asked.

“I see your arm is already healing, friend,” I said. “Maybe I should chop off both your legs at the same time.”

With the greatest restraint, Rhoshamandes held back his sobs. I saw pure agony in his eyes as he looked at me, and then back at the severed arm and hand.

“I will command Benedict to kill the boy,” said the Voice, filled with panic and rage as surely as Rhoshamandes was. “I will tell him now.”

“No, you won’t, Voice,” I said under my breath. I looked down as I spoke to make it clear to everyone present that I was talking to the enemy himself. “Because if Benedict were like to do it, it would be done. He won’t do any such thing until he knows his maker’s safe. I’ll wager his loyalty to his maker is a Hell of a lot stronger than his loyalty to you.”

I turned to Rhoshamandes. “Now make us hear your fledgling Benedict talking through that phone now, clearly and distinctly, or I will chop off both your legs and split your breastbone with this ax.”

Rhoshamandes put his right hand to his mouth now as if he were about to be sick. His face was blanched, and covered in a thin film of blood sweat. He was trembling violently. He reached for the phone and lifted it and struggled apparently to make his trembling fingers and thumb obey him.